As my Postmedia colleague, Liz Braun, wrote Monday in covering the release of a new documentary about Fonyo called Hope by filmmaker Alan Zweig, Fonyo became a national hero in 1985 at the age of 19 by raising over $13 million for cancer research through his cross-country run.

Having lost a leg to cancer at age 12, Fonyo followed in the footsteps of one-legged marathon runner, Terry Fox, completing the journey Fox began.

Five years before Fonyo finished his run, Fox, a promising athlete who lost a leg to cancer at age 18, was forced to end his cross-Canada Marathon of Hope to raise money and awareness for cancer research near Thunder Bay, after the disease invaded his lungs.

Fox died in 1981, one month short of his 23rd birthday.

Today, he is rightly remembered as a hero and icon, the youngest person ever named a Companion of the Order of Canada.

Annual Terry Fox runs in Canada and dozens of other countries have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research.

Fonyo, now 51, completed his cross-country journey in 1985, but subsequently fell into a life of addiction and crime, recounted in an earlier documentary by Zweig entitled Hurt.

Hope is the story of Fonyo’s struggle, an optimistic one so far, to return to a productive life.

His appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1985, the youngest person named to that honour, was revoked by the advisory council of the Governor General’s Office in 2009.

This was unjust and cruel.

Fonyo’s later fall from grace had nothing to do with the reason he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.

It didn’t diminish the extraordinary altruism he displayed as an 19-year-old, at a time when most teenagers have far more earthly interests uppermost in their minds.

While the advisory council of the Order has the power to revoke it from anyone who subsequently commits a crime or brings disrepute to the Order, this provision is misguided.

Who, at age 19, is sure of how their life will turn out?

The Order of Canada was given to Fonyo in recognition of a great achievement when he was a teenager.

It was not a “good conduct” medal, nor should it have been conditional on Fonyo living out our ideal of how a teenage hero should behave for the rest of his life.

As Elaine Tanner, one of Canada’s greatest competitive swimmers and an Officer of the Order of Canada wrote in a letter to the editor, describing the revocation of Fonyo’s Order of Canada as “unjust” and “short-sighted”: “Perfect heroes are for fairy tales, but not real life.”

Peter Worthington, the Sun’s founding editor, was adamant that the Order of Canada should never be revoked for later misdeeds.

He cited the words of King George V who, commenting on a dispute over whether the Victoria Cross — Britain’s highest award for military valour — should be revoked for subsequent wrongdoing, said: “No matter the crime committed by anyone on whom the Victoria Cross has been conferred, the decoration should not be forfeited. Even were a VC to be sentenced to be hanged for murder, he should be allowed to wear the VC on the scaffold.”